Time Team

Ninja Tune; 2012

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Given that the rallying cry for progressive bass music in 2012 amounts to "Not another shitty house album," it's difficult to remember that as recently as 2010 there was a third avenue available to producers not inclined to four-on-the-floor kickdrum patterns or wubs'n'dubs moshing. Sometimes referred to as "bitstep," there was a handful of producers-- including early Zomby and Philadelphia's Starkey (an example), even James Blake's outré moments-- that were constructing bold, mechanistic dub-funk. Slugabed's Ultra Heat Treated EP was one of the ripest examples of this style, which, in drawing from dubstep, American hip-hop, grime, and hard techno, offered a more robust sound palette than most anything else being released. If Detroit techno was, as Derrick May famously said, George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator, this was Dr. Dre pumping out of Optimus Prime's speakers. To quote the title of a track from Slugabed's Time Team: "It's When the Future Falls Plop on Your Head".

The shame is that neither that track-- which closes Time Team on a slight note-- nor the rest of Slugabed's debut long-player sounds much like the future at all. Since Ultra Heat Treated, Slugabed has released two EPs of increasingly glossy synth turbulence, refining his sound by sanding off the edges that made it-- and anything that came into contact with-- bleed. Slugabed can thank London's recent fascination with house music for the fact that he has rarely sounded further askew from his particular generation of bass producers. Time Team has as much in common with Scuba as it does Skrillex, which is to say very little (though Sluga's bold, manic productions are a purer interpretation of Aphex Twin's legacy than Skrillex's widely praised "I also like melody"-devotion).

His default mode now is a slow, saccharine boogie-- dubstep filtered through a g-funk lean-- that still relies on his alien sound palette. He favors call-and-response synth figures, overseeing cat-and-mouse games between timorous whistles and black-rubber bass. Rhythms that used to forcefully contort his melodies are more cooperative now; the busy latter half of "Dragon Drums" is an afternoon shower compared to the gale-force storms he used to summon, but he's never so inattentive as to let his drums fall into gridlocked kicks or lazy boom-bap.

There's still a sense of discovery, now paired with playfulness. Sluga's vocal samples aren't ashen divas but wishful, chiming children, like he's borrowed Boards of Canada's pastoral naivety but transposed their nostalgia into sci-fi galavanting. On the mid-album "Mountains Come Out of the Sky" and "Grandma Paints Nice" he offers faraway vistas, the likes of which you might find on a fantasy novel's cover: the sky is purple, there are a half-dozen visible moons, endless possibilities presented in comfortable, familiar ways.

But looking out at eight moons would be really beautiful, so I can lose myself in the tasteful aphorisms of "Unicorn Suplex" and "Climbing a Tree"'s Books-y niceties. I wish Slugabed dropped the hammer more often on Time Team, but sometimes the future plops on your head when you wish it would bash it in.